Sunday, April 19, 2009

A day in reverse.

"Yet it all seems so normal. Certainly the psychologists who have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins, saw what they did as necessary. And the doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically advanced medical system in the world. And the teacher, who sees no problem with 20% of her fourth graders being on Ritalin, in the name of "appropriate behavior," is happy to have control of her classroom. None of these feel like dupes or pawns of a corporate state. It seems like just the way things are. Just modern American reality. Which is a corporate generated reality."- And an interesting article via Darth Hilarious.

8 comments:

Ok, so I read the article. What does anyone have to offer that is better than what we have? Why should we abandon the holographic national state to embrace dirty grubby life? Because some self-righteous ex-patriot hippy, some leftover from the sixties is more comfortable washing in the ocean with a bar of soap than he is in a modern bathroom?

We don't know. The West has been shaped by the all-pervasive forms of Capitalism, and we've all bought into the illusion. I'm well aware of that. As to what the rest of the world has to offer? I think you have to live there to find out.

"Why should we abandon the holographic national state to embrace dirty grubby life?"

What's wrong with being a yuppie? We recycle more, drive more eco-conscious vehicles, lobby for more green technology, and people listen because we're clean and have money. More yuppies drive hybrid Lexuses than SUVs, bro.

"Shouldn't anyone be okay with that, man? Isn't it a way of getting back to nature when we've forgotten what nature is actually like?"

Ok, I don't have time for a full post. But, I lived on a hippy commune in the 90s. For two years. Zendik Farm. Google "Wulf Zendik." He hung with Ginsberg and the whole crew from the 60s. I'm intimately familiar with the hippy lifestyle. I've "returned to Nature." I've rediscovered "what nature is really like."

Seriously, maybe you should too. It might make you appreciate what you've got. Nature is rough in antennae and mandible; the dominate species in Nature is not man, but insect. They lay eggs beneath your skin that hatch and fly away, leaving you infected and scarred. They swim up your piss stream from the river and lodge in your urethra. They carry malaria, yellow fever, mononucleosis.

In Nature, you are a part of nature's available eco system. You're fodder for fungus as well as insect. Scabies and tenea (pedis and higher) were the norm on "the farm." We were in Bastrop, Texas at the time I lived there, and the stream we swm in left us with this weird skin fungus that looked like a birth mark. It didn't itch or peel or anything. The solution recommended by the hippies? Tea tree oil.

It doesn't work.

We yuppie children asked our parents to send us neosporin and bandaids. Soap. Anti-bacterial soap. And the hippies made fun of us while they scratched their heads and loved their dreads and stank and had weird patches on their skin.

Yeah, go back to nature and remember why we aren't there anymore. And someday someone needs to be reminded that Man is Natural too. What we do is natural. Unless we're alien.

I see merits in both ways of thinking. I embrace modernism and the ways we have made to make life more convenient. I obviously like IT technology. I also know people whose life have turned significantly better due to anti-depressant drugs and central stimulants such as Ritalin.

But if medications are used to cover up for a bad education system then obviously I do see a problem. Such is also the case of industrialized society. It can be a boon, but if we let it run is instead of the other way around it can produce alienated employees, destruction of eco-systems and bad products.